On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, David Christian Berg wrote:
There's a feature request for cmyk and spot colors somewhere in the bug tracker. However, if you guys could spend some thoughts on how it might be implemented in inkscape that'd be cool.
We discussed this a bit at the original Scribus/Inkscape IRC meeting, and there should be a summary in Wiki. We had identified littlecms as something that should be investigated for Inkscape to tie into. I don't think anyone is actively working on that presently; if you'd like to push this area, perhaps you could do some research and experimentation with littlecms to scope out what we may need to do to implement support for it in Inkscape?
A good place to start would be updating / expounding on the InkscapeColor page in wiki. Add some of your ideas for handling cmyk there. Also look at the ColorPalette page, that captures some earlier (pre-Inkscape) ideas for colors, that may tie in with or be replaced by your ideas.
Now since the native format of svg just is rgb, I wonder (as I did in the bug tracker) if it is possible to define the colors used in the defs and add a cmyk equivalent in a inkscape tag. The user would manipulate the cmyk equivalent and inkscape would recaculate the rgb value... something like that.
This may tie in with the underlying CSS in Inkscape, which isn't very flexible currently (in fact, style.* really needs to be gutted and completely redesigned.) Ideally, it should be possible to define new styles, so a user could select several shapes and assign a property (such as a named color), and then tweak the style definitions separately.
Then on ps eps or pdf (see below) export, the cmyk values would be embedded instead of the rgb values.
Now concerning pdfs. I tried to import my svg flyer to scribus. That worked fine, really, exept that fonts weren't recognized, but the workaround is to convert them to curves. Now scribus 1.2 really screws up on resizing groups in a way that they exceed the page boundaries... causing me to start all over again a few times. Then -- as I was warned -- gradients with the end points of the object are not exported to pdf and the color output viewed with adobe acrobat afterwards seemed really poor for cmyk. This is why I'm very much hoping for smoothly working pdf output directly from inkscape. That would just be so cool, and for me a lot more important than many other things you can work around (oh well, baseline grid would really (!) help as well -- yes Corel doesn't have it, but that doesn't mean you don't need it :-) --, but other than that inkscape is already such a good app)
Easily asked for. ;-) This is one of the many frequently requested features, so I'm sure it'll get done eventually. What we really need is a developer who is gung ho on implementing good svg->pdf conversion algorithms.
Perhaps Cairo may be a path to explore here... hmm... David, could you investigate the Cairo tools and see if there is a commandline tool that does good SVG->PDF conversion? If so, that may provide the need without us needing to do additional development. :-)
Ok I know you're busy, but I needed to put this down, because I just talked to another ESTIEM designer about PR stuff and am wrapping up a document where I mention Inkscape (along with Corel and Freehand and Illustrator) as the program of choice for vector editing. Saying this, can I point to some gtk installation tutorial? I know there is a setup now for inkscape, but don't I also need the gtk stuff first?
Hmm, the gtk stuff should get installed automatically if needed. In certain cases maybe you'd need to install Gtk separately, but I'd expect that at that point you're beyond where a tutorial would be of help. ;-)
Bryce